Alioth is broken, and there is nobody around to fix it. Don't ask the remaining people who give it life support to implement fixes and changes. It is being replaced by a cocktail of ?GitLab (see Salsa), read-only repos and keep-alive mechanisms. See below for more information.

What is Alioth?

Alioth.debian.org is a Debian server running FusionForge (used to be GForge). It's much like sourceforge or savannah but it's a service for Debian Developers and all other kinds of contributors together.

If you just want to learn about the current collaborative resource, please look at Salsa, which has by and large superseded Alioth.

Benefits of registering an account on Alioth

An Alioth account provides several benefits:

It can be used to access many Debian projects resources as a single sign-on provider

It makes it possible for contributors activity to be tracked and shared on the Debian contributors list, even when using different email addresses across several official and unofficial projects (wiki, forums, packaging, etc.)

Next update were in preparation at Alioth/News, but that is probably out of date now.

Deprecation of Alioth

Alioth was deprecated and will vanish with the wheezy EOL. Please read the hints below about specific Alioth services.

Note that content will *not* be automatically migrated to the new instance. As an effort to cleanup the old Alioth service, users will have to migrate the content on their own. The instructions below show how to migrate away from Alioth.

There is potential overlap between this section and the Salsa/AliothMigration documentation. Be careful to avoid adding documentation here that's already there and vice versa. Add links instead, as is already done. -- TheAnarcat 2018-03-13 16:09:16

Git

The new ?GitLab-based service will only provide Git repositories hosting. Furthermore, users will need to migrate the repositories on their own - no automated, mass move is currently planned. This will help sort out outdated and unused repositories.

Other VCS

Since ?GitLab only supports Git, this means projects using other version control systems (VCS) like Mercurial, SVN or CVS will need to migrate. In May 2017, there were the following number of repositories on Alioth:

git: 18907

svn: 2377

bzr: 71

hg: 27

darcs: 22

arch: 7

cvs: 2

mtn: 0

All the repositories not using git will either need to find another host or convert to git. Subversion, Mercurial and Bazaar repositories can be easily converted to git using the official documentation. Darcs repositories can also easily be converted. Finally, poor old CVS and Arch can *also* be converted using the git cvsimport and archimport commands.

Issue trackers

?GitLab has excellent issue trackers. Like Git repositories, content will not be automatically migrated, however.

Shell service

While Alioth currently allows members to login on the machine through a shell (SSH), this will not be allowed on the new server, other than to interoperate with Git repositories as defined by the gitlab-shell.

Forums

It is suggested that people use mailing lists, ?GitLab issue trackers or other services to replace forums, which will be completely shutdown when Alioth is decomissionned.

Web pages and documentation

GitLab pages provides an equivalent functionality to the current "Web pages" service. A major difference is that content needs to be stored in a Git repository, at last least possible to generate from the Git repository, through ?GitLab's continuous integration (CI) subsystem.

Releases and downloads

Git tags are the basic interface to create releases in ?GitLab. this creates a tarball and allows extra files to be attached to the tag. There are, unfortunately, no download statistics on ?GitLab right now.

Existing releases will not be automatically migrated either.

Mailing lists

There isn't a full replacement planned for mailing lists. The Alioth admins have suggested a few possible alternatives:

moving the list to lists.debian.org, if eligible

use tracker.debian.org (for team lists)

use the notification system of ?GitLab for code updates (to replace -commit mailing lists)

try to keep lists.alioth.debian.org running separately

That the solutions proposed may be incomplete, but we do not want to be blocking the deployment of the Alioth replacement based on this issue. Besides, Alioth can keep running those mailing lists for a while...

All VCS repositories can be automatically created by FusionForge: enable “Source code management (SCM)” in your project (this can be done in the “Admin” tab, click on “Edit public infos”), then go the “Admin“ page in the “SCM” tab and there you can choose the type of SCM wanted. The repository will be automatically created by a cron job some hours later.

Alioth uses a modified version of FusionForge, see Alioth/FAQ#src to grab the dedicated bzr branch. Feel free to send us patches that apply to this tree if you want to get something fixed in a more timely fashion.

How can I help?

We tend to have a big number of support requests, please help us deal with those. Sometimes it requires a change to FusionForge, sometimes it only requires explanations to the submitter, you'll surely find something to do over there.